Yes we had a hot vacation in London, England and a bit in Wales. I do mean hot, because there wasn't a flake of snow to be seen anywhere. We wore sweaters and wind breakers on the colder days, but ha-ha, cold there is steamy hot here.
We hopped off the plane, dropped our luggage and headed to a Poop filtration plant that was Steam Powered. I'm not kidding. The dates for this trip were organized by this station being opened and by a day long course I wanted to take with Karen Ruane. You can guess which date I preferred. Steve was happy as a clam, taking photos and joshing around with old coots in uniforms. At this point, we had been up for nearly 24 hours. My enthusiasm was low. Of course you are wondering what exactly we were looking at. 1850's London had too much sewage in the Thames, it stank, they dug two canals to collect it all and it wend its way to this station. Steam powered squishers went into action, poop was stirred, it settled in settling ponds and I have no idea what happened after that. There were three kinds of enthusiast at the event, those who love to wonder about the life of poop, those who go silly in the head over steam engines of any kind and the odd duck (see, life is really relative) who is like a wiggling puppy when there is both. I participated by peeing twice in the usual way.
Notice that I don't have any photos.
We finally returned to the hotel, had Italian for dinner and crashed. Our first real day (because the previous day really was weird) was spent at the Tate Modern and the Globe as well as a hugely long walk along one of the embankments.
My first photo in London. We are crossing the Thames and headed to the Tate Modern.
FOUR Joseph Alber's paintings. I love him. He was a perfectionist colour theorist in the 30's and on, painted all sorts of colour combinations to prove his colour theory and probably bored everyone in hearing distance to death. But I love the colour combinations he fooled around with.
You can barely see the Globe Theatre, it is the one sticking out between the two trees with white walls and black timber framing. This is a rebuilding of Shakespeare's company theatre. It also shows the Thames at low tide. Even at low tide, the river runs very fast.
In writing these few paragraphs, I have realized my photo file is huge and unwieldy. It will take ages to load up one photo at a time, so I need to sort them all and make some smaller files. You know I'm back, I know you know and I'll be working in the studio like mad to stitch and sort photos for next Tuesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment